Transport Industry Quotes

The public is often accused of being disconnected from its military, but frankly it's disconnected from just about everything. Farming, mineral extraction, gas and oil production, bulk cargo transport, logging, fishing, infrastructure construction—all the industries that keep the nation going are mostly unacknowledged by the people who depend on them most.

At Mayflower-Plymouth, we are excited to invest in the evolution of a lot of different industries from IP to E-commerce to Transportation to Real Estate and more. But in every case, the goal is to add value and make things better. We are an investment company with soul and with purpose.

Being a polymath makes me a better investor and a better CEO. Because I have multiple interests and multiple skill sets that span across various industries and topic areas, I’m often able to approach investments from a place knowing, from a place of experience and with a sense of authority. Whether it’s IP, Patents, Transportation, Music, Education or Wellness…. I’ve got some background in it so I’m able lead Mayflower-Plymouth with investing in any or all of these effectively.

And my car back then, a Studebaker as I recall, was powered, as are most of all means of transportation and other machinery today, and electric power plants and furnaces, by the most abused, addictive, and destructive drugs of all: fossil fuels. When you got here, even when I got here, the industrialized world was already hopelessly hooked on fossil fuels, and very soon now there won't be any left. Cold turkey. Can I tell you the truth? I mean this isn't the TV news is it? Here's what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial. And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we're hooked on.

They knew that their anarchism was the product of a very high civilization, of a complex diversified culture, of a stable economy and a highly industrialized technology that could maintain high production and rapid transportation of goods. However vast the distances separating settlements, they held to the ideal of complex organicism.

We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements—transportation, communications, and all other industries; agriculture, medicine, education, entertainment, protecting the environment; and even the key democratic institution of voting—profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.

Farming, mineral extraction, gas and oil production, bulk cargo transport, logging, fishing, infrastructure construction—all the industries that keep the nation going are mostly unacknowledged by the people who depend on them most.

This important point that we have just illustrated with the case of motorized transport: When a new item of technology is introduced as an option that an individual can accept or not as he chooses, it does not necessarily REMAIN optional. In many cases the new technology changes society in such a way that people eventually find themselves FORCED to use it.

His thought about the bird halts as the CRAB in his wrist glows. CRAB—Conservable RNA Augmented Body, the faithful servant for a citizen, as the advertisements from the World Government say. This parasitic bio-computer, installed in his left wrist, bears his identity. A hologram projects on it when he fists that hand near his chest. A text message visible in his inbox: You’re missing the Independence Day Speech, auto-signed with Ren. Yuan ignores it. The next text plays in his brain when he is not looking at the CRAB: Come on! The war-hero can’t miss the speech in Alphatech when the war hero himself is its owner! Ren. Yuan doesn’t reply to Ren Agnello, the CEO of Alphatech—the world’s leading transport and robotics industry, of which the Monk is the founder. Well, one of the two founders.

All that remains of the garden city in our own day are traffic-free enclaves, islands in a sea of traffic where the pedestrian leads a legally protected by languishing existence, comparable to that of the North American Indians on their reservations...In reality the modern urbanist regards the city as a gigantic centre of production, geared to the efficient transport of workers and goods, to the accommodation of people and the storage of wares, to industrial and commercial activity. The rest, that is to say creativity, life, is optional and comes under the heading of recreation and leisure activities.

Western Civilization was responsible for a paradigm shift in history. It created the industrial and scientific revolutions that enabled the birth of a transportation, communications and knowledge revolution unprecedented in the 5 billion year history of this planet. Unfortunately this revolution took place amidst a moral vacuum at the very top of the power structure. It is as if a three year old child had been given control over both a candy story and a shotgun. He was able to use the shotgun to get all the candy he wanted but he had no idea what to do next. Whenever somebody tried to tell him too much candy was bad for him, he shot the person who said that.

if you have ever wondered why horse-drawn carriages and dogsleds are far more common modes of travel than sheep-dragged sleighs, it is because sheep are not well-suited for employment in the transportation industry.

This historic general election, which showed that the British are well able to distinguish between patriotism and Toryism, brought Clement Attlee to the prime ministership. In the succeeding five years, Labor inaugurated the National Health Service, the first and boldest experiment in socialized medicine. It took into public ownership all the vital (and bankrupted) utilities of the coal, gas, electricity and railway industries. It even nibbled at the fiefdoms and baronies of private steel, air transport and trucking. It negotiated the long overdue independence of India. It did all this, in a country bled white by the World War and subject to all manner of unpopular rationing and controls, without losing a single midterm by-election (a standard not equaled by any government of any party since). And it was returned to office at the end of a crowded term.

When foreign military spending [bombing Korea and Vietnam] forced the U.S. balance of payments into deficit and drove the United States off gold in 1971, central banks were left without the traditional asset used to settle payments imbalances. The alternative by default was to invest their subsequent payments inflows in U.S. Treasury bonds, as if these still were “as good as gold.” Central banks have been holding some $4 trillion of these bonds in their international reserves for the past few years — and these loans have financed most of the U.S. Government’s domestic budget deficits for over three decades. Given the fact that about half of U.S. Government discretionary spending is for military operations — including more than 750 foreign military bases and increasingly expensive operations in the oil-producing and transporting countries — the international financial system is organized in a way that finances the Pentagon, along with U.S. buyouts of foreign assets expected to yield much more than the Treasury bonds that foreign central banks hold.

We are dealing, then, with an absurdity that is not a quirk or an accident, but is fundamental to our character as people. The split between what we think and what we do is profound. It is not just possible, it is altogether to be expected, that our society would produce conservationists who invest in strip-mining companies, just as it must inevitably produce asthmatic executives whose industries pollute the air and vice-presidents of pesticide corporations whose children are dying of cancer. And these people will tell you that this is the way the "real world" works. The will pride themselves on their sacrifices for "our standard of living." They will call themselves "practical men" and "hardheaded realists." And they will have their justifications in abundance from intellectuals, college professors, clergymen, politicians. The viciousness of a mentality that can look complacently upon disease as "part of the cost" would be obvious to any child. But this is the "realism" of millions of modern adults. There is no use pretending that the contradiction between what we think or say and what we do is a limited phenomenon. There is no group of the extra-intelligent or extra-concerned or extra-virtuous that is exempt. I cannot think of any American whom I know or have heard of, who is not contributing in some way to destruction. The reason is simple: to live undestructively in an economy that is overwhelmingly destructive would require of any one of us, or of any small group of us, a great deal more work than we have yet been able to do. How could we divorce ourselves completely and yet responsibly from the technologies and powers that are destroying our planet? The answer is not yet thinkable, and it will not be thinkable for some time -- even though there are now groups and families and persons everywhere in the country who have begun the labor of thinking it. And so we are by no means divided, or readily divisible, into environmental saints and sinners. But there are legitimate distinctions that need to be made. These are distinctions of degree and of consciousness. Some people are less destructive than others, and some are more conscious of their destructiveness than others. For some, their involvement in pollution, soil depletion, strip-mining, deforestation, industrial and commercial waste is simply a "practical" compromise, a necessary "reality," the price of modern comfort and convenience. For others, this list of involvements is an agenda for thought and work that will produce remedies. People who thus set their lives against destruction have necessarily confronted in themselves the absurdity that they have recognized in their society. They have first observed the tendency of modern organizations to perform in opposition to their stated purposes. They have seen governments that exploit and oppress the people they are sworn to serve and protect, medical procedures that produce ill health, schools that preserve ignorance, methods of transportation that, as Ivan Illich says, have 'created more distances than they... bridge.' And they have seen that these public absurdities are, and can be, no more than the aggregate result of private absurdities; the corruption of community has its source in the corruption of character. This realization has become the typical moral crisis of our time. Once our personal connection to what is wrong becomes clear, then we have to choose: we can go on as before, recognizing our dishonesty and living with it the best we can, or we can begin the effort to change the way we think and live.

If you really want to be right (or at least improve the odds of being right), you have to start by acknowledging your fallibility, deliberately seeking out your mistakes, and figuring out what caused you to make them. This truth has long been recognized in domains where being right is not just a zingy little ego boost but a matter of real urgency: in transportation, industrial design, food and drug safety, nuclear energy, and so forth. When they are at their best, such domains have a productive obsession with error. They try to imagine every possible reason a mistake could occur, they prevent as many of them as possible, and they conduct exhaustive postmortems on the ones that slip through. By embracing error as inevitable, these industries are better able to anticipate mistakes, prevent them, and respond appropriately when those prevention efforts fail.

Two large trials of antioxidants were set up after Peto’s paper (which rather gives the lie to nutritionists’ claims that vitamins are never studied because they cannot be patented: in fact there have been a great many such trials, although the food supplement industry, estimated by one report to be worth over $50 billion globally, rarely deigns to fund them). One was in Finland, where 30,000 participants at high risk of lung cancer were recruited, and randomised to receive either ß-carotene, vitamin E, or both, or neither. Not only were there more lung cancers among the people receiving the supposedly protective ß-carotene supplements, compared with placebo, but this vitamin group also had more deaths overall, from both lung cancer and heart disease. The results of the other trial were almost worse. It was called the ‘Carotene and Retinol Efficacy Trial’, or ‘CARET’, in honour of the high p-carotene content of carrots. It’s interesting to note, while we’re here, that carrots were the source of one of the great disinformation coups of World War II, when the Germans couldn’t understand how our pilots could see their planes coming from huge distances, even in the dark. To stop them trying to work out if we’d invented anything clever like radar (which we had), the British instead started an elaborate and entirely made-up nutritionist rumour. Carotenes in carrots, they explained, are transported to the eye and converted to retinal, which is the molecule that detects light in the eye (this is basically true, and is a plausible mechanism, like those we’ve already dealt with): so, went the story, doubtless with much chortling behind their excellent RAF moustaches, we have been feeding our chaps huge plates of carrots, to jolly good effect. Anyway. Two groups of people at high risk of lung cancer were studied: smokers, and people who had been exposed to asbestos at work. Half were given 3-carotene and vitamin A, while the other half got placebo. Eighteen thousand participants were due to be recruited throughout its course, and the intention was that they would be followed up for an average of six years; but in fact the trial was terminated early, because it was considered unethical to continue it. Why? The people having the antioxidant tablets were 46 per cent more likely to die from lung cancer, and 17 per cent more likely to die of any cause,* than the people taking placebo pills. This is not news, hot off the presses: it happened well over a decade ago.

There are many well-known arguments for why the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis was different. It was higher tech. Death came faster. It was industrial in its scale. All true. But it’s also true that every holocaust is different. Every genocide has its own particular characteristics, and every hated group is hated in its own special way. By sheer numbers of dead, the genocide of Indigenous peoples in the Americas surpasses all others. In terms of modern technologies, the transatlantic trade in kidnapped and enslaved Africans, and the plantations the trade served in the antebellum South and the Caribbean, were highly modern for their times. So cutting-edge, scholars have shown, that the systems developed to transport, insure, depreciate, track, control, and extract maximum wealth from this coerced labor shaped many aspects of modern accounting and human resources management. And as Rinaldo Walcott, a scholar of race and gender, writes in his manifesto On Property, “The ideas forged in the plantation economy continue to shape our social relations.” Among those social relations are modern policing, mass surveillance, and mass incarceration. On what else does the claim to exceptionalism rest?

For years and years, even during the time of my first visit in 1962, it has been said that Calcutta was dying, that its port was silting up, its antiquated industry declining, but Calcutta hadn't died. It hadn't done much, but it had gone on; and it had begun to appear that the prophecy has been excessive. Now it occurred to me that perhaps this was what happened when cities died. They don't die with a bang; they didn't die only when they were abandoned. Perhaps, they died like this: when everybody was suffering, when transport was so hard that working people gave up jobs they needed because the fear the suffering of the travel; When no one had clean water or air; No one could go walking. Perhaps city died when they lost amenities that cities provided, the visual excitement, the heightened sense of human possibility, and became simply places where there were too many people, and people suffered.

We just haven’t yet discovered the political will, economic might, and cultural flexibility to install and activate them, because doing so requires something a lot bigger, and more concrete, than imagination—it means nothing short of a complete overhaul of the world’s energy systems, transportation, infrastructure and industry and agriculture. Not to mention, say, our diets or our taste for Bitcoin. The cryptocurrency now produces as much CO2 each year as a million transatlantic flights.

Westerners came in with guns, they made the native governments sign agreements not to raise their import tariff over 5 percent and in one case 8 percent. Japan didn’t get free from that tariff until the 20th century. In China and in the Ottoman Empire they didn’t get rid of it until well in the 20th century. And this 5 percent tariff made it impossible for them to keep European industrial goods out and preserve the handicraft of their own peasantry. Well, now, the transportation and communication revolution requires capital. Where are they going to get it? There is no development ahead of it which would provide it. It requires labor. Where are they going to get that? Their economic system, their agricultural system, is already producing hardly enough. Well, the way they got these skilled technologists, where they got these inventions, where they got the capital was, of course, from Europe, generally by borrowing it and building railroads and so forth. But they were not paying for it themselves.

The Chinese government assigns capital to everything. Infrastructure development. Industrial plant buildout. Transport systems. Educational systems. Health systems. Everything and anything that puts people in jobs. Excruciatingly little of it would qualify as “wise capital allocation.” The goal isn’t efficiency or profitability, but instead achieving the singular political goal of overcoming regional, geographic, climatic, demographic, ethnic, and millennia of historical barriers to unity. No price is too high.

By 1900, a small white minority radiating out from Europe would come to control most of world’s land surface, imposing the imperatives of a commercial economy and international trade on Asia’s mainly agrarian societies. Europeans backed by garrisons and gunboats could intervene in the affairs of any Asian country they wished to. They were free to transport millions of Asian labourers to far-off colonies (Indians to the Malay Peninsula, Chinese to Trinidad); exact the raw materials and commodities they needed for their industries from Asian economies; and flood local markets with their manufactured products. The peasant in his village and the market trader in his town were being forced to abandon a life defined by religion, family and tradition amid rumours of powerful white men with a strange god-on-a-cross who were reshaping the world- men who married moral aggressiveness with compact and coherent nation-states, the profit motive and superior weaponry, and made Asian societies seem lumberingly inept in every way, unable to match the power of Europe or unleash their own potential.

The age of centralized, command-and-control, extraction-resource-based energy sources (oil, gas, coal and nuclear) will not end because we run out of petroleum, natural gas, coal, or uranium. It will end because these energy sources, the business models they employ, and the products that sustain them will be disrupted by superior technologies, product architectures, and business models. Compelling new technologies such as solar, wind, electric vehicles, and autonomous (self-driving) cars will disrupt and sweep away the energy industry as we know it.

The Saudis considered the petroleum under their soil a gift from God, but accessing its value laid within man’s capacity. Until the Saudis developed the capabilities themselves, they would simply import the human capital they needed to make that petroleum valuable. This meant importing Aramco to run the oil industry, IBI and, later, other companies to build modern cities and transportation, and even American financial advisors to create a modern banking system. The trick was to buy what they did not have from the outside, and then to make it their own.

Finding a situation that catches the key competitor or competitors with conflicting goals is at the heart of many company success stories. The slow Swiss reaction to the Timex watch provides an example. Timex sold its watches through drugstores, rather than through the traditional jewelry store outlets for watches, and emphasized very low cost, the need for no repair, and the fact that a watch was not a status item but a functional part of the wardrobe. The strong sales of the Timex watch eventually threatened the financial and growth goals of the Swiss, but it also raised an important dilemma for them were they to retaliate against it directly. The Swiss had a big stake in the jewelry store as a channel and a large investment in the Swiss image of the watch as a piece of fine precision jewelry. Aggressive retaliation against Timex would have helped legitimize the Timex concept, threatened the needed cooperation of jewelers in selling Swiss watches, and blurred the Swiss product image. Thus the Swiss retaliation to Timex never really came. There are many other examples of this principle at work. Volkswagen’s and American Motor’s early strategies of producing a stripped-down basic transportation vehicle with few style changes created a similar dilemma for the Big Three auto producers. They had a strategy built on trade-up and frequent model changes. Bic’s recent introduction of the disposable razor has put Gillette in a difficult position: if it reacts it may cut into the sales of another product in its broad line of razors, a dilemma Bic does not face.4 Finally, IBM has been reluctant to jump into minicomputers because the move will jeopardize its sales of larger mainframe computers.

She stood and meandered around the room. “For fifty thousand years, right up to the industrial revolution, human civilization was about one thing and one thing only: food. Every culture that existed put most of their time, energy, manpower, and resources into food. Hunting it, gathering it, farming it, ranching it, storing it, distributing it…it was all about food. “Even the Roman Empire. Everyone knows about the emperors, the armies, and the conquests. But what the Romans really invented was a very efficient system of acquiring farmland and transportation of food and water.

Animals arrive at slaughter exhausted, thirsty, hungry, and terrified. Every year 100,000 factory farmed cattle arrive at slaughter injured, or too dispirited to walk; undercover investigators have repeatedly documented downed animals who are kicked, beaten, pushed with bulldozers, and dragged from transport trucks with ropes or a chain, though they are fully conscious, in pain, and bellowing pitifully. Cows exploited in the dairy industry, because they are older and their bodies have been exhausted by perpetual pregnancy, birthing, and milking, are among the most pathetic when they arrive at slaughter.

the tech revolution means more comforts for everyone. It means easier communication, education, transportation, and work. Technology equalizes opportunity in important ways. Much of this is good. But it also fuels a cult of efficiency, a fetish for tools, and a lopsided focus on the future. It fosters boredom with the past. It feeds self-interest. It transfers huge wealth to a new, highly secular leadership class. It punishes many workers in traditional industries. It renders, or seems to render, the “supernatural” obsolete. And with its power to manipulate and propagandize, it reshapes our political life.

The largest sources of CO2 from animal agriculture come not from the animals themselves (through respiration and waste), but from the inputs and land-use changes necessary to maintain and feed them, including: burning fossil fuels to produce fertilisers used in feed production; maintaining intensive animal production facilities; growing the associated animal feed; transporting the animal feed; and processing and transporting the animal products. Furthermore, clearing land to graze livestock and grow feed is the largest single cause of deforestation and among the major causes of land degradation and desertification.

I arrived at this conclusion partly because, like most people who have latterly concluded that membership of the European Union provided the United Kingdom with rather more benefits than problems, I didn’t have particularly strong convictions about the issue until after the decision to leave it had been taken. The more I read and researched as part of the preparation for my show, the more I realised how sketchy my previous understanding had been. And when ‘no deal’ began to seem possible, speaking to people in the transport and haulage industries who understood precisely how catastrophic it would be left me as embarrassed as I was shocked.

To eat responsibly is to understand and enact, so far as one can, this complex relationship. What can one do? Here is a list, probably not definitive: 1. Participate in food production to the extent that you can. If you have a yard or even just a porch box or a pot in a sunny window, grow something to eat in it. Make a little compost of your kitchen scraps and use it for fertilizer. Only by growing some food for yourself can you become acquainted with the beautiful energy cycle that revolves from soil to seed to flower to fruit to food to offal to decay, and around again. You will be fully responsible for any food that you grow for yourself, and you will know all about it. You will appreciate it fully, having known it all its life. 2. Prepare your own food. This means reviving in your own mind and life the arts of kitchen and household. This should enable you to eat more cheaply, and it will give you a measure of “quality control”: You will have some reliable knowledge of what has been added to the food you eat. 3. Learn the origins of the food you buy, and buy the food that is produced closest to your home. The idea that every locality should be, as much as possible, the source of its own food makes several kinds of sense. The locally produced food supply is the most secure, the freshest, and the easiest for local consumers to know about and to influence. 4. Whenever possible, deal directly with a local farmer, gardener, or orchardist. All the reasons listed for the previous suggestion apply here. In addition, by such dealing you eliminate the whole pack of merchants, transporters, processors, packagers, and advertisers who thrive at the expense of both producers and consumers. 5. Learn, in self-defense, as much as you can of the economy and technology of industrial food production. What is added to food that is not food, and what do you pay for these additions? 6. Learn what is involved in the best farming and gardening. 7. Learn as much as you can, by direct observation and experience if possible, of the life histories of the food species. The

Etatism by no means aims at the formal transformation of all ownership of the means of production into State ownership by a complete overthrow of the established legal system. Only the biggest industrial, mining, and transport enterprises are to be nationalized; in agriculture, and in medium- and small-scale industry, private property is nominally to continue. Nevertheless, all enterprises are to become State undertakings in fact. Owners are to be left the title and dignity of ownership, it is true, and to be given a right to the receipt of a 'reasonable' income, 'in accordance with their position'; but, in fact, every business is to be changed into a government office and every livelihood into an official profession.

This is not a healthy outlook for America. We are also facing the same combination of destabilizing events that took place in Imperial Russia before the Bolshevik Revolution, such as: 1. A crisis in government policies to improve deteriorating industry and transportation. (Yes ) 2. Difficulty in providing basic provisions to the citizenry. (Not yet) 3. A 36% decrease in gross industrial production. (Yes) 4. 50% of enterprises closing major industrial centers of manufacturing. (Almost there) 5. Sharp increase in the cost of living. (Yes) 6. Real wages fell 50% in the past 4 years. (Yes) 7. National debt rose 400%. (Yes) 8. Debt to foreign governments (like China and Saudi Arabia) exceeds 20%. (Yes) 9. Actual history becomes illegal. (Almost there)

For fifty thousand years, right up to the industrial revolution, human civilization was about one thing and one thing only: food. Every culture that existed put most of their time, energy, manpower, and resources into food. Hunting it, gathering it, farming it, ranching it, storing it, distributing it…it was all about food. “Even the Roman Empire. Everyone knows about the emperors, the armies, and the conquests. But what the Romans really invented was a very efficient system of acquiring farmland and transportation of food and water.” She walked to the other side of the room. “The industrial revolution mechanized agriculture. Since then, we’ve been able to focus our energies on other things. But that’s only been the last two hundred years. Before that, most people spent most of their lives directly dealing with food production.

The same thing, notes Brynjolfsson, happened 120 years ago, in the Second Industrial Revolution, when electrification—the supernova of its day—was introduced. Old factories did not just have to be electrified to achieve the productivity boosts; they had to be redesigned, along with all business processes. It took thirty years for one generation of managers and workers to retire and for a new generation to emerge to get the full productivity benefits of that new power source. A December 2015 study by the McKinsey Global Institute on American industry found a “considerable gap between the most digitized sectors and the rest of the economy over time and [found] that despite a massive rush of adoption, most sectors have barely closed that gap over the past decade … Because the less digitized sectors are some of the largest in terms of GDP contribution and employment, we [found] that the US economy as a whole is only reaching 18 percent of its digital potential … The United States will need to adapt its institutions and training pathways to help workers acquire relevant skills and navigate this period of transition and churn.” The supernova is a new power source, and it will take some time for society to reconfigure itself to absorb its full potential. As that happens, I believe that Brynjolfsson will be proved right and we will start to see the benefits—a broad range of new discoveries around health, learning, urban planning, transportation, innovation, and commerce—that will drive growth. That debate is for economists, though, and beyond the scope of this book, but I will be eager to see how it plays out. What is absolutely clear right now is that while the supernova may not have made our economies measurably more productive yet, it is clearly making all forms of technology, and therefore individuals, companies, ideas, machines, and groups, more powerful—more able to shape the world around them in unprecedented ways with less effort than ever before. If you want to be a maker, a starter-upper, an inventor, or an innovator, this is your time. By leveraging the supernova you can do so much more now with so little. As Tom Goodwin, senior vice president of strategy and innovation at Havas Media, observed in a March 3, 2015, essay on TechCrunch.com: “Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening.

Conceive a world-society developed materially far beyond the wildest dreams of America. Unlimited power, derived partly from the artificial disintegration of atoms, partly from the actual annihilation of matter through the union of electrons and protons to form radiation, completely abolished the whole grotesque burden of drudgery which hitherto had seemed the inescapable price of civilization, nay of life itself. The vast economic routine of the world-community was carried on by the mere touching of appropriate buttons. Transport, mining, manufacture, and even agriculture were performed in this manner. And indeed in most cases the systematic co-ordination of these activities was itself the work of self-regulating machinery. Thus, not only was there no longer need for any human beings to spend their lives in unskilled monotonous labour, but further, much that earlier races would have regarded as highly skilled though stereotyped work, was now carried on by machinery. Only the pioneering of industry, the endless exhilarating research, invention, design and reorganization, which is incurred by an ever-changing society, still engaged the minds of men and women. And though this work was of course immense, it could not occupy the whole attention of a great world-community. Thus very much of the energy of the race was free to occupy itself with other no less difficult and exacting matters, or to seek recreation in its many admirable sports and arts. Materially every individual was a multi-millionaire, in that he had at his beck and call a great diversity of powerful mechanisms; but also he was a penniless friar, for he had no vestige of economic control over any other human being. He could fly through the upper air to the ends of the earth in an hour, or hang idle among the clouds all day long. His flying machine was no cumbersome aeroplane, but either a wingless aerial boat, or a mere suit of overalls in which he could disport himself with the freedom of a bird. Not only in the air, but in the sea also, he was free. He could stroll about the ocean bed, or gambol with the deep-sea fishes. And for habitation he could make his home, as he willed, either in a shack in the wilderness or in one of the great pylons which dwarfed the architecture even of the American age. He could possess this huge palace in loneliness and fill it with his possessions, to be automatically cared for without human service; or he could join with others and create a hive of social life. All these amenities he took for granted as the savage takes for granted the air which he breathes. And because they were as universally available as air, no one craved them in excess, and no one grudged another the use of them.

If a society, a city, or a territory, were to guarantee the necessaries of life to its inhabitants (and we shall see how the conception of the necessaries of life can be so extended as to include luxuries), it would be compelled to take possession of what is absolutely needed for production; that is to say — land, machinery, factories, means of transport, etc. Capital in the hands of private owners would be expropriated and returned to the community. The great harm done by bourgeois society, as we have already mentioned, is not only that capitalists seize a large share of the profits of each industrial and commercial enterprise, thus enabling them to live without working, but that all production has taken a wrong direction, as it is not carried on with a view to securing well-being to all. For this reason we condemn it. Moreover, it is impossible to carry on mercantile production in everybody’s interest. To wish it would be to expect the capitalist to go beyond his province and to fulfill duties that he cannot fulfill without ceasing to be what he is — a private manufacturer seeking his own enrichment. Capitalist organization, based on the personal interest of each individual trader, has given all that could be expected of it to society — it has increased the productive force of work. The capitalist, profiting by the revolution effected in industry by steam, by the sudden development of chemistry and machinery, and by other inventions of our century, has endeavoured in his own interest to increase the yield of work, and in a great measure he has succeeded. But to attribute other duties to him would be unreasonable. For example, to expect that he should use this superior yield of work in the interest of society as a whole, would be to ask philanthropy and charity of him, and a capitalist enterprise cannot be based on charity.

It never ceases to amaze me how many Christians, in the North and the South, continue to refer to the former as the “developed” and the latter as the “developing” world. When we in the South use this term to describe ourselves, we are evaluating ourselves by a set of cultural values that are alien to our own cultures, let alone to a Christian world-view! All our normative images and yardsticks of “development” are ideologically loaded. Who dictates that mushrooming TV satellite dishes and skyscrapers are signs of “development”? Who, apart from the automobile industry and the advertising agencies, seriously believes that a country with six-lane highways and multi-story car-parks is more “developed” than one whose chief mode of transport is railways? Does the fact that there are more telephones in Manhattan, New York, than in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa, mean that human communication is more developed in the former than the latter?

Man, attracted by the treasure that the victory over the whale might afford him, has troubled the peace of their immense solitary abodes, violated their refuges, sacrificed all those which the icy, unapproachable polar deserts could not screen from his blow; and the war he has had made on them has been especially cruel because he has seen that it is large catches that make his commerce prosperous, his industry vital, his sailors numerous, his navigators daring, his pilots experienced, his navies strong and his power great. Thus it is that these giants among giants have fallen beneath his arms; and because his genius is immortal and his science now imperishable, because he has been able to multiply without limit the imaginings of his mind, they will not cease to be the victims of his interest until they have ceased to exist. In vain do they flee before him; his art will transport him to the ends of the earth; they find no sanctuary except in nothingness.

If we look at the way an industrial producer creates new products, we see a long list of trials and errors and eventually improvement in quality at a lower cost. Urban policies and strategies, by contrast, often do not follow this logic; they are often repeated even when it is well known that they failed. For instance, policies like rent control, greenbelts, new light rail transports, among others, are constantly repeated in spite of a near consensus on their failure to achieve their objectives. A quantitative evaluation of the failure of these policies is usually well documented through special reports or academic papers; it is seldom produced internally by cities, however, and the information does not seem to reach urban decision makers. Only a systematic analysis of data through indicators allows urban policies to be improved over time and failing policies to be abandoned. But as Angus Deaton wrote: 'without data, anyone who does anything is free to claim success.

If you ever hear the words conventional and wisdom conjoined, reject them. Because if it is conventional, it isn’t wisdom. And if it’s wisdom, it isn’t conventional. —Herb Kelleher How has Southwest been able to attain uncommon results in the worst industry in capitalism? The company has succeeded by being unconventional. Herb likes to tell the story of how a Washington think tank told the company that it would not be able to survive without six of the “keys to success” that other carriers have used. Southwest followed none of those keys to success. At every point of Southwest’s history, the company has successfully challenged industry norms. Southwest differed from the competition because of its low-cost fares. In the 1970s, before deregulation, flying was expensive, because the government controlled the prices. Rollin King and Herb Kelleher’s idea was to provide lower fares and enable a greater number of Americans to fly. Southwest would not be competing with other airlines but with other forms of transportation.

Knowledge about the nutritious properties and growth cycles of what would later become staple crops, feeding vast populations – wheat, rice, corn – was initially maintained through ritual play farming of exactly this sort. Nor was this pattern of discovery limited to crops. Ceramics were first invented, long before the Neolithic, to make figurines, miniature models of animals and other subjects, and only later cooking and storage vessels. Mining is first attested as a way of obtaining minerals to be used as pigments, with the extraction of metals for industrial use coming only much later. Mesoamerican societies never employed wheeled transport; but we know they were familiar with spokes, wheels and axles since they made toy versions of them for children. Greek scientists famously came up with the principle of the steam engine, but only employed it to make temple doors that appeared to open of their own accord, or similar theatrical illusions. Chinese scientists, equally famously, first employed gunpowder for fireworks.

By the end of the 1970s, a clear majority of the employed population of Britain, Germany, France, the Benelux countries, Scandinavia and the Alpine countries worked in the service sector—communications, transport, banking, public administration and the like. Italy, Spain and Ireland were very close behind. In Communist Eastern Europe, by contrast, the overwhelming majority of former peasants were directed into labour-intensive and technologically retarded mining and industrial manufacture; in Czechoslovakia, employment in the tertiary, service sector actually declined during the course of the 1950s. Just as the output of coal and iron-ore was tailing off in mid-1950s Belgium, France, West Germany and the UK, so it continued to increase in Poland, Czechoslovakia and the GDR. The Communists’ dogmatic emphasis on raw material extraction and primary goods production did generate rapid initial growth in gross output and per capita GDP. In the short run the industrial emphasis of the Communist command economies thus appeared impressive (not least to many Western observers). But it boded ill for the region’s future.

Clark Air base in Angeles City is a hub of commerce. The streets teem with industrious Filipinos hustling to make a living. Rusty cars and trucks clog narrow streets and honk their horns with abandon. Jeepneys ferry passengers around town for only a few pesos and serve as public transportation. The jeepney is the official vehicle of the Philippines. Jeepneys are long, open-sided jeeps and have bench seats for passengers. The best jeepneys are very ornate, their hoods festooned with a multitude of fancy chrome horses and ornaments, multihued streamers, and hand-operated rubber-bulb horns. Safety standards are third-world-relaxed in the PI, and jeepney drivers casually smoke cigarettes while they sit with plastic containers of gasoline nestled between their feet. The clear plastic jugs have a tube that connects to the engine and serves as the jeepney’s improvised gas tank, making it easier for the driver to monitor and conserve fuel. Jeepneys are not the only transportation available. Small, sidecar-equipped motorcycles called tricycles, also serve as cheap taxis, crowding the streets near popular establishments. The alleys are lined with side-by-side food stalls, and street vendors occupy every corner.

The German economic system as it existed before the war depended on three main factors: I. Overseas commerce as represented by her mercantile marine, her colonies, her foreign investments, her exports, and the overseas connections of her merchants; II. The exploitation of her coal and iron and the industries built upon them; III. Her transport and tariff system. Of these the first, while not the least important, was certainly the most vulnerable. The Treaty aims at the systematic destruction of all three, but principally of the first two. I (1) Germany has ceded to the Allies all the vessels of her mercantile marine exceeding 1600 tons gross, half the vessels between 1000 tons and 1600 tons, and one quarter of her trawlers and other fishing boats.[9] The cession is comprehensive, including not only vessels flying the German flag, but also all vessels owned by Germans but flying other flags, and all vessels under construction as well as those afloat.[10] Further, Germany undertakes, if required, to build for the Allies such types of ships as they may specify up to 200,000 tons[11] annually for five years, the value of these ships being credited to Germany against what is due from her for Reparation.[12]

This revolution in the role of government has been accompanied, and largely produced, by an achievement in public persuasion that must have few rivals. Ask yourself what products are currently least satisfactory and have shown the least improvement over time. Postal service, elementary and secondary schooling, railroad passenger transport would surely be high on the list. Ask yourself which products are most satisfactory and have improved the most. Household appliances, television and radio sets, hi-fi equipment, computers, and, we would add, supermarkets and shopping centers would surely come high on that list. The shoddy products are all produced by government or government-regulated industries. The outstanding products are all produced by private enterprise with little or no government involvement. Yet the public—or a large part of it—has been persuaded that private enterprises produce shoddy products, that we need ever vigilant government employees to keep business from foisting off unsafe, meretricious products at outrageous prices on ignorant, unsuspecting, vulnerable customers. That public relations campaign has succeeded so well that we are in the process of turning over to the kind of people who bring us our postal service the far more critical task of producing and distributing energy.

I also gained a deeper appreciation of what it must have been like for my mother to be in a foreign country unable to speak the language (in her case, unable to read or write any language). As I walked around by myself, however, it was obvious that based on my body language people perceived me as American but at the same time different enough from other Americans that they felt free to come up and ask me all kinds of personal questions about where I came from, what kind of work I did, whether I was married, how many people there were in my family. Back in the 1930s when I asked personal questions like these of a Chinese student at Bryn Mawr, she reprimanded me for being too personal. I’m not sure whether that was because she came from a higher social class or because the revolution has opened things up. I answered their questions as best as I could in my limited Chinese. The ingenuity and energy of the Chinese reminded me of my father, for example, the way that they used bicycles, often transformed into tricycles, for transporting all kinds of things: little children (sometimes in a sidecar), bricks and concrete, beds and furniture. I was amazed at the number of entrepreneurs lining the sidewalks with little sewing machines ready to alter or make a garment, barbers with stools and scissors, knife sharpeners, shoe repairmen, vendors selling food and other kinds of merchandise from carts. Everywhere I went I saw women knitting, as they waited for a bus or walked along the street, as if they couldn’t waste a minute. I had never seen such an industrious people. It was unlike anything that I had witnessed in England, France, the West Indies, Africa, or the United States.

The Times Exclusive Reveal of Windermere Six Thanks to an anonymous source, the Times is pleased to share an exclusive list of the six children who were transported yesterday evening to Hollingsworth Hall, the magnificent and secluded home of Camilla Lenore DeMoss, the Countess of Windermere. They are, in no particular order: Oliver Appleby: Heir to the Appleby Jewelry fortune. This young chap is known to be an excellent student who also excels at rowing and cricket. Viola Dale: The Dales are well known throughout London for their dedication to social reform and relief for those in distress. Young Viola has been a presence on the charitable event circuit since the age of two. Frances Wellington: Miss Wellington's parents are internationally known art collectors who have an impeccable eye for up-and-coming talent in sculpture and painting. They also delve into gems of historical value. Frances is privately tutored, and her deliciously expensive introduction to London society is already being buzzed about. Barnaby Trundle: Young Barnaby attends school in South London. His father works in the textile industry. One of his teachers says Barnaby is "occasionally quick-tempered with other boys in his form." Edward Herringbone: The Herringbones are close acquaintances with the aforementioned Dales, their own admirable interests lying mainly in reducing poverty by increasing educational opportunities. Edward has been called "an indubitable library of a boy" by one of his teaching masters at St. Stephen's. Tabitha Crum: Miss Crum's father is employed by the Wilting Bank of South London. A neighbor of the family says that the lucky child "talks to herself" and calls the Crums "socially famished.

Yet just eighty years ago it still seemed an impossible mission when U.S. President Herbert Hoover was tasked with beating back the Great Depression with only a mixed bag of numbers, ranging from share values to the price of iron to the volume of road transport. Even his most important metric – the “blast-furnace index” – was little more than an unwieldy construct that attempted to pin down production levels in the steel industry. If you had asked Hoover how “the economy” was doing, he would have given you a puzzled look. Not only because this wasn’t among the numbers in his bag, but because he would have had no notion of our modern understanding of the word “economy.” “Economy” isn’t really a thing, after all – it’s an idea, and that idea had yet to be invented. In 1931, Congress called together the country’s leading statisticians and found them unable to answer even the most basic questions about the state of the nation. That something was fundamentally wrong seemed evident, but their last reliable figures dated from 1929. It was obvious that the homeless population was growing and that companies were going bankrupt left and right, but as to the actual extent of the problem, nobody knew. A few months earlier, President Hoover had dispatched a number of Commerce Department employees around the country to report on the situation. They returned with mainly anecdotal evidence that aligned with Hoover’s own belief that economic recovery was just around the bend. Congress wasn’t reassured, however. In 1932, it appointed a brilliant young Russian professor by the name of Simon Kuznets to answer a simple question: How much stuff can we make? Over the next few years, Kuznets laid the foundations of what would later become the GDP. His

Different form, same function. Many companies that create blue oceans attract customers from other industries who use a product or service that performs the same function or bears the same core utility as the new one but takes a very different physical form. In the case of Ford’s Model T, Ford looked to the horse-drawn carriage. The horse-drawn carriage had the same core utility as the car: transportation for individuals and families. But it had a very different form: a live animal versus a machine. Ford effectively converted the majority of noncustomers of the auto industry, namely customers of horse-drawn carriages, into customers of its own blue ocean by pricing its Model T against horse-drawn carriages and not the cars of other automakers. In the case of the school lunch catering industry, raising this question led to an interesting insight. Suddenly those parents who make their children’s lunches came into the equation. For many children, parents had the same function: making their child’s lunch. But they had a very different form: mom or dad versus a lunch line in the cafeteria. Different form and function, same objective. Some companies lure customers from even further away. Cirque du Soleil, for example, has diverted customers from a wide range of evening activities. Its growth came in part through drawing people away from other activities that differed in both form and function. For example, bars and restaurants have few physical features in common with a circus. They also serve a distinct function by providing conversational and gastronomical pleasure, a very different experience from the visual entertainment that a circus offers. Yet despite these differences in form and function, people have the same objective in undertaking these three activities: to enjoy a night out.

Every time we sit down to breakfast, we are likely to be benefiting from a dozen such prehistoric inventions. Who was the first person to figure out that you could make bread rise by the addition of those microorganisms we call yeasts? We have no idea, but we can be almost certain she was a woman and would most likely not be considered ‘white’ if she tried to immigrate to a European country today; and we definitely know her achievement continues to enrich the lives of billions of people. What we also know is that such discoveries were, again, based on centuries of accumulated knowledge and experimentation – recall how the basic principles of agriculture were known long before anyone applied them systematically – and that the results of such experiments were often preserved and transmitted through ritual, games and forms of play (or even more, perhaps, at the point where ritual, games and play shade into each other). ‘Gardens of Adonis’ are a fitting symbol here. Knowledge about the nutritious properties and growth cycles of what would later become staple crops, feeding vast populations – wheat, rice, corn – was initially maintained through ritual play farming of exactly this sort. Nor was this pattern of discovery limited to crops. Ceramics were first invented, long before the Neolithic, to make figurines, miniature models of animals and other subjects, and only later cooking and storage vessels. Mining is first attested as a way of obtaining minerals to be used as pigments, with the extraction of metals for industrial use coming only much later. Mesoamerican societies never employed wheeled transport; but we know they were familiar with spokes, wheels and axles since they made toy versions of them for children. Greek scientists famously came up with the principle of the steam engine, but only employed it to make temple doors that appeared to open of their own accord, or similar theatrical illusions. Chinese scientists, equally famously, first employed gunpowder for fireworks.

Dear KDP Author, Just ahead of World War II, there was a radical invention that shook the foundations of book publishing. It was the paperback book. This was a time when movie tickets cost 10 or 20 cents, and books cost $2.50. The new paperback cost 25 cents – it was ten times cheaper. Readers loved the paperback and millions of copies were sold in just the first year. With it being so inexpensive and with so many more people able to afford to buy and read books, you would think the literary establishment of the day would have celebrated the invention of the paperback, yes? Nope. Instead, they dug in and circled the wagons. They believed low cost paperbacks would destroy literary culture and harm the industry (not to mention their own bank accounts). Many bookstores refused to stock them, and the early paperback publishers had to use unconventional methods of distribution – places like newsstands and drugstores. The famous author George Orwell came out publicly and said about the new paperback format, if “publishers had any sense, they would combine against them and suppress them.” Yes, George Orwell was suggesting collusion. Well… history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Fast forward to today, and it’s the e-book’s turn to be opposed by the literary establishment. Amazon and Hachette – a big US publisher and part of a $10 billion media conglomerate – are in the middle of a business dispute about e-books. We want lower e-book prices. Hachette does not. Many e-books are being released at $14.99 and even $19.99. That is unjustifiably high for an e-book. With an e-book, there’s no printing, no over-printing, no need to forecast, no returns, no lost sales due to out of stock, no warehousing costs, no transportation costs, and there is no secondary market – e-books cannot be resold as used books. E-books can and should be less expensive. Perhaps channeling Orwell’s decades old suggestion, Hachette has already been caught illegally colluding with its competitors to raise e-book prices. So far those parties have paid $166 million in penalties and restitution. Colluding with its competitors to raise prices wasn’t only illegal, it was also highly disrespectful to Hachette’s readers. The fact is many established incumbents in the industry have taken the position that lower e-book prices will “devalue books” and hurt “Arts and Letters.” They’re wrong. Just as paperbacks did not destroy book culture despite being ten times cheaper, neither will e-books. On the contrary, paperbacks ended up rejuvenating the book industry and making it stronger. The same will happen with e-books. Many inside the echo-chamber of the industry often draw the box too small. They think books only compete against books. But in reality, books compete against mobile games, television, movies, Facebook, blogs, free news sites and more. If we want a healthy reading culture, we have to work hard to be sure books actually are competitive against these other media types, and a big part of that is working hard to make books less expensive. Moreover, e-books are highly price elastic. This means that when the price goes down, customers buy much more. We've quantified the price elasticity of e-books from repeated measurements across many titles. For every copy an e-book would sell at $14.99, it would sell 1.74 copies if priced at $9.99. So, for example, if customers would buy 100,000 copies of a particular e-book at $14.99, then customers would buy 174,000 copies of that same e-book at $9.99. Total revenue at $14.99 would be $1,499,000. Total revenue at $9.99 is $1,738,000. The important thing to note here is that the lower price is good for all parties involved: the customer is paying 33% less and the author is getting a royalty check 16% larger and being read by an audience that’s 74% larger. The pie is simply bigger.

Indian Express (Indian Express) - Clip This Article at Location 721 | Added on Sunday, 30 November 2014 20:28:42 Fifth column: Hope and audacity Ministers, high officials, clerks and peons now report for duty on time and are no longer to be seen taking long lunch breaks to soak in winter sunshine in Delhi’s parks. Reform is needed not just in economic matters but in every area of governance. Does the Prime Minister know how hard it is to get a passport? Tavleen Singh | 807 words At the end of six months of the Modi sarkar are we seeing signs that it is confusing efficiency with reform? I ask the question because so far there is no sign of real reform in any area of governance. And, because some of Narendra Modi’s most ardent supporters are now beginning to get worried. Last week I met a man who dedicated a whole year to helping Modi become Prime Minister and he seemed despondent. When I asked how he thought the government was doing, he said he would answer in the words of the management guru Peter Drucker, “There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all.” We can certainly not fault this government on efficiency. Ministers, high officials, clerks and peons now report for duty on time and are no longer to be seen taking long lunch breaks to soak in winter sunshine in Delhi’s parks. The Prime Minister’s Office hums with more noise and activity than we have seen in a decade but, despite this, there are no signs of the policy changes that are vital if we are to see real reform. The Planning Commission has been abolished but there are many, many other leftovers from socialist times that must go. Do we need a Ministry of Information & Broadcasting in an age when the Internet has made propaganda futile? Do we need a meddlesome University Grants Commission? Do we need the government to continue wasting our money on a hopeless airline and badly run hotels? We do not. What we do need is for the government to make policies that will convince investors that India is a safe bet once more. We do not need a new government that simply implements more efficiently bad policies that it inherited from the last government. It was because of those policies that investors fled and the economy stopped growing. Unless this changes through better policies, the jobs that the Prime Minister promises young people at election rallies will not come. So far signals are so mixed that investors continue to shy away. The Finance Minister promises to end tax terrorism but in the next breath orders tax inspectors to go forth in search of black money. Vodafone has been given temporary relief by the courts but the retroactive tax remains valid. And, although we hear that the government has grandiose plans to improve the decrepit transport systems, power stations and ports it inherited, it continues to refuse to pay those who have to build them. The infrastructure industry is owed more than Rs 1.5 lakh continued... crore in government dues and this has crippled major companies. No amount of efficiency in announcing new projects will make a difference unless old dues are cleared. Reform is needed not just in economic matters but in every area of governance. Does the Prime Minister know how hard it is to get a passport? Does he know that a police check is required even if you just want to get a few pages added to your passport? Does he know how hard it is to do routine things like registering property? Does he know that no amount of efficiency will improve healthcare services that are broken? No amount of efficiency will improve educational services that have long been in terminal decline because of bad policies and interfering officials. At the same time, the licence raj that strangles private investment in schools and colleges remains in place. Modi’s popularity with ordinary people has increased since he became Prime Minister, as we saw from his rallies in Kashmir last week, but it will not la

For decades now our produce research has been on ship-ability, not on taste, texture, or nutritional density. Genetic selection is skewed toward cultivars that can withstand bouncing around in the back of a tractor-trailer for a thousand miles. Tomatoes selected for long-distance transport must be genetically similar to cardboard, not those luscious garden-grown varieties that ooze juice down to your elbows when you bite into them. Our food system has completely ignored human health and opted instead for fast growth and convenient availability. Would anybody want to argue that nutritional density, taste, and tender texture are better than cardboard shipping qualities?

Civil Aviation Authoritues are the custodians of the National Air Transport Critical Infrastructure in their respective countries, They are therefore duty bound towards having a Critical Infrastructure Resilience Strategy geared towards the continued operation of air transport in the face of all hazards. As a mandatory, CAA's are duty bound therefore to ensure their charge achieves the continued provision of essential services (provided by the critical infrastructure in their charge) to businesses, governments and the stakeholding community within the aviation industry, as well as to other critical infrastructure sectors.

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It’s worth noting, incidentally, that most private corporations are fantastically inefficient, although their inefficiency is disguised by collusion with the government: Contrary to their claims of efficiency, most large corporations…spend an inordinate portion of society’s resources on advertising, executive perks and salaries, transportation and communications to far-flung corporate empires, and lobbying expenses. Most depend for their profits and survival on a complex regime of public subsidies, exemptions, and externalized costs, including the indirect subsidies they gain when allowed to pay less than a living wage, maintain substandard working conditions, market hazardous products, dump untreated wastes into the environment, and extract natural resources from public lands at below-market prices. Ralph Estes…estimates that in 1994 corporations extracted more than $2.6 trillion a year in such subsidies in the United States alone—roughly five times their reported profits… It is one of the basic principles of efficient market function that the full costs of a product or service be borne by the seller and passed on to the buyer. Yet many corporations would be forced to close their doors or restructure if they had to bear the true full costs of their operations.123 Americans sometimes think of large size almost as an end in itself, or at least as necessary for economic efficiency. But this is not always the case. In some industries, economies of scale do exist. But large size tends to entail bureaucratic inefficiencies, environmental destruction, allocative inequalities, political corruption, in general significant negative externalities.124

hold. That’s because each pillar can only function in relationship to the others. The five pillars of the Third Industrial Revolution are (1) shifting to renewable energy; (2) transforming the building stock of every continent into micro–power plants to collect renewable energies on site; (3) deploying hydrogen and other storage technologies in every building and throughout the infrastructure to store intermittent energies; (4) using Internet technology to transform the power grid of every continent into an energy-sharing intergrid that acts just like the Internet (when millions of buildings are generating a small amount of energy locally, on site, they can sell surplus back to the grid and share electricity with their continental neighbors); and (5) transitioning the transport fleet to electric plug-in and fuel cell vehicles that can buy and sell electricity on a smart, continental, interactive power grid.

In The Box, a history of the container, the economist Marc Levinson describes a 1954 voyage on a typical cargo ship, SS Warrior. It carried 74,903 cases, 71,726 cartons, 24,036 bags, 10,671 boxes, 2,880 bundles, 2,877 packages, 2,634 pieces, 1,538 drums, 888 cans, 815 barrels, 53 wheeled vehicles, 21 crates, 10 transporters, 5 reels, and 1,525 undetermined items. A total of 194,582 pieces, all of which had to be loaded and unloaded by hand. The total weight came to just over five thousand tons of cargo and would have taken weeks to move. Kendal can unload and load several thousand boxes in less than twenty-four hours.

The Saudi experience with IBI, though brief, proved instrumental and became a model for how the Saudis went on to conduct business. Saudi Arabia understood that it lacked the resources of more developed nations. These included a large population, an educated populace, capital, credit, and native businesses. What Saudi Arabia realized it did have was an immense quantity of a very desirable resource: petroleum. Because it lacked so many resources, it could not drill for, extract, refine, transport, or sell that petroleum on its own. It needed outside firms to access the value of the petroleum, at least initially.

What Was the Industrial Revolution? Most fundamentally, the Industrial Revolution was an economic and technological revolution in which humans started to use fossil fuels to generate power for machines to manufacture and transport things in massive quantities. Factories first appeared in the late eighteenth century in England, and methods of industrial production quickly spread to France, Germany, and the United States. Within one hundred years, the Industrial Revolution spread to Eastern Europe and the Pacific Rim, including Japan. As you read this, a wave of industrialization is sweeping through India, Asia, South America, and parts of Africa.

Regardless of whether you think the industrial era has been good or bad, three profoundly fundamental shifts underlie this revolution. The first is that industrialists harnessed new sources of energy, primarily to produce things. Preindustrial people occasionally used wind or water to generate power, but they mostly relied on muscles—human and animal—to generate force. Industrial pioneers such as James Watt (who invented the modern steam engine) figured out how to transform energy from fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and gas into steam, electricity, and other kinds of power to run machines. The first of these machines were designed to make textiles, but within decades others were invented to make iron, mill wood, plow fields, transport things, and do just about everything else one can manufacture and sell (including beer)7. A second major component of the Industrial Revolution was a reorganization of economies and social institutions. As industrialization gathered steam, capitalism, in which individuals compete to produce goods and services for profit, became the world’s dominant economic system, spurring the development of further industrialization and social change. As workers changed their locus of activity from the farm to factories and companies, more people had to work together even as they needed to perform more specialized activities. Factories required more coordination and regulation. In

grocery chains could, for example, maximise their profits by raising prices on certain lines after 6 p.m. when richer clientele may dominate. Although no one in the grocery market is using dynamic pricing, it is common in other industries, including transportation, electronics and even fashion. India

Against this backdrop of diverse geography, farming and fishing still dominate the economy. Many farmers rely on mule transportation and agricultural techniques that have persisted for generations. They tend citrus and olive groves planted by their forefathers, and cultivate grapes, figs, capers, olives, wheat, and tobacco. Family-run enterprises extract marble, pumice, and iron ore from local sources. The island of Halki derives its name from the Greek word for copper (halkos), a reminder of the copper mines that once covered it. Manufacturers on the island of Chios have longed produced mastichochoria, an aromatic resin used to make cosmetics and employed in other industries as well.

An indispensable good transported to the far corners of the world, black gold had become the very vector of the industrial vascular network, the blood of human technology.

if we were to build a Great Pyramid today, we would need a lot of patience. In preparation for his book "5/5/2000 Ice: The Ultimate Disaster", Richard Noone asked Merle Booker, technical director of the Indiana Limestone Institute of America, to prepare a time study of what it would take to quarry, fabricate, and ship enough limestone to duplicate the Great Pyramid. Using the most modern quarrying equipment available for cutting, lifting, and transporting the stone, Booker estimated that the present-day Indiana limestone industry would need to triple its output, and it would take the entire industry, which as I have said includes thirty-three quarries, twenty-seven years to fill the order for 131,467,940 cubic feet of stone. These estimates were based on the assumption that production would proceed without problems. Then we would be faced with the task of putting the limestone blocks in place. The level of accuracy in the base of the Great Pyramid is astounding, and is not demanded, or even expected, by building codes today. Civil engineer Roland Dove, of Roland P. Dove & Associates, explained that .02 inch per foot variance was acceptable in modern building foundations. When I informed him of the minute variation in the foundation of the Great Pyramid, he expressed disbelief and agreed with me that in this particular phase of construction, the builders of the pyramid exhibited a state of the art that would be considered advanced by modern standards.

Even before zoning, differing locational needs help to nudge the most incompatible uses apart: • Industries need to be where land is cheap and transportation is accessible, and complaining neighbors are few and far between. • Large office and commercial centers thrive on the visibility and access afforded by major corridors and transit interchanges. • Residential developments are content to fill up the quiet side streets in between, along with inoffensive retail—think corner stores and cafes. Homeowners don’t want factories or malls showing up on their cul-de-sacs—and they can rest assured that those factories and malls don’t want to open up on their cul-de-sac either. As the legal scholar Bernard Siegan observed in his landmark study of Houston, the city achieves much of what we might consider to be desirable use segregation

... It strikes me that if I'm in such a febrile and imaginative mood I ought to take advantage of it with some serious writing exercises or at least a few ideas for stories, if only to demonstrate that I'm not treating this here commonplace book solely as a journal to record my most recent attacks of jitters! Maybe I should roll my sleeves up and attempt as least an opening practice paragraph or two of this confounded novel I'm pretending to be writing. Let's see how it looks. Marblehead: An American Undertow By Robert D. Black Iron green, the grand machinery of the Atlantic grates foam gears against New England with the rhythmic thunder of industrial percussion. A fine dust of other lands and foreign histories is carried in suspension on its lurching, slopping mechanism: shards of bright green glass from Ireland scoured blunt and opaque by brine, or sodden splinters of armada out of Spain. The debris of an older world, a driftwood of ideas and people often changed beyond all recognition by their passage, clatters on the tideline pebbles to deposit unintelligible grudges, madnesses and visions in a rank high-water mark, a silt of fetid dreams that further decompose amid the stranded kelp or bladder-wrack and pose risk of infection. Puritans escaping England's murderous civil war cast broad-brimmed shadows onto rocks where centuries of moss obscured the primitive horned figures etched by vanished tribes, and after them came the displaced political idealists of many nations, the religious outcasts, cults and criminals, to cling with grim determination to a damp and verdant landscape until crushed by drink or the insufferable weight of their accumulated expectations. Royalist cavaliers that fled from Cromwell's savage interregnum and then, where their puritanical opponents settled the green territories to the east, elected instead to establish themselves deep in a more temperate South, bestowing their equestrian concerns, their courtly mannerisms and their hairstyles upon an adopted homeland. Heretics and conjurors who sought new climes past the long shadow of the stake; transported killers and procurers with their slates wiped clean in pastures where nobody knew them; sour-faced visionaries clutching Bunyan's chapbook to their bosoms as a newer and more speculative bible, come to these shores searching for a literal New Jerusalem and finding only different wilderness in which to lose themselves and different game or adversaries for the killing. All of these and more, bearing concealed agendas and a hundred diverse afterlives, crashed as a human surf of Plymouth Rock to fling their mortal spray across the unsuspecting country, individuals incendiary in the having lost their ancestral homelands they were without further longings to relinquish. Their remains, ancient and sinister, impregnate and inform the factory-whistle furrows of oblivious America.

... It strikes me that if I'm in such a febrile and imaginative mood I ought to take advantage of it with some serious writing exercises or at least a few ideas for stories, if only to demonstrate that I'm not treating this here commonplace book solely as a journal to record my most recent attacks of jitters! Maybe I should roll my sleeves up and attempt as least an opening practice paragraph or two of this confounded novel I'm pretending to be writing. Let's see how it looks. Marblehead: An American Undertow By Robert D. Black Iron green, the grand machinery of the Atlantic grates foam gears against New England with the rhythmic thunder of industrial percussion. A fine dust of other lands and foreign histories is carried in suspension on its lurching, slopping mechanism: shards of bright green glass from Ireland scoured blunt and opaque by brine, or sodden splinters of armada out of Spain. The debris of an older world, a driftwood of ideas and people often changed beyond all recognition by their passage, clatters on the tideline pebbles to deposit unintelligible grudges, madnesses and visions in a rank high-water mark, a silt of fetid dreams that further decompose amid the stranded kelp or bladder-wrack and pose risk of infection. Puritans escaping England's murderous civil war cast broad-brimmed shadows onto rocks where centuries of moss obscured the primitive horned figures etched by vanished tribes, and after them came the displaced political idealists of many nations, the religious outcasts, cults and criminals, to cling with grim determination to a damp and verdant landscape until crushed by drink or the insufferable weight of their accumulated expectations. Royalist cavaliers that fled from Cromwell's savage interregnum and then, where their puritanical opponents settled the green territories to the east, elected instead to establish themselves deep in a more temperate South, bestowing their equestrian concerns, their courtly mannerisms and their hairstyles upon an adopted homeland. Heretics and conjurors who sought new climes past the long shadow of the stake; transported killers and procurers with their slates wiped clean in pastures where nobody knew them; sour-faced visionaries clutching Bunyan's chapbook to their bosoms as a newer and more speculative bible, come to these shores searching for a literal New Jerusalem and finding only different wilderness in which to lose themselves and different game or adversaries for the killing. All of these and more, bearing concealed agendas and a hundred diverse afterlives, crashed as a human surf on Plymouth Rock to fling their mortal spray across the unsuspecting country, individuals incendiary in that having lost their ancestral homelands they were without further longings to relinquish. Their remains, ancient and sinister, impregnate and inform the factory-whistle furrows of oblivious America.

Unlike predominantly home-centred industries, the primacy concern for large firms was not so much to cut wages as to cut their workforce through robotization and subcontracting. On the other hand, internationalizing core advanced industries has also been in the vanguard of efforts to reduce social overhead costs of production in the United States. That is to say, as they traded national oligopoly for world industry status, they have become increasingly concerned with reducing costs of inputs that are not internationally competitive, including health provision, communications, domestic transport, construction, as well as safety and environmental regulation.

Colonial regimes, particularly late colonial regimes, have often been sites of extensive experiments in social engineering.34 An ideology of “welfare colonialism” combined with the authoritarian power inherent in colonial rule have encouraged ambitious schemes to remake native societies. If one were required to pinpoint the “birth” of twentieth-century high modernism, specifying a particular time, place, and individual—in what is admittedly a rather arbitrary exercise, given high modernism’s many intellectual wellsprings—a strong case can be made for German mobilization during World War I and the figure most closely associated with it, Walther Rathenau. German economic mobilization was the technocratic wonder of the war. That Germany kept its armies in the field and adequately supplied long after most observers had predicted its collapse was largely due to Rathenau’s planning.35 An industrial engineer and head of the great electrical firm A.E.G (Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft), which had been founded by his father, Rathenau was placed in charge of the Office of War Raw Materials (Kriegsrohstoffabteilung).36 He realized that the planned rationing of raw materials and transport was the key to sustaining the war effort. Inventing a planned economy step by step, as it were, Germany achieved feats—in industrial production, munitions and armament supply, transportation and traffic control, price controls, and civilian rationing—that had never before been attempted.

Historian Francis Russell noted that inadequate working conditions and rising prices both frightened and galvanized workers. “Wherever one turned, in industry or transportation or public service, there seemed to be a strike or threatened strike,” he said. “To add to the malaise, prices, instead of falling, continued to rise. The value of the 1914 dollar had dropped to only forty-five cents. Food costs had gone up 84 percent, clothes, 114 percent. For the average American family, the cost of living was double what it had been five years earlier, and income had lagged behind. Professional classes, from clergymen and professors to clerks, state and city employees, firemen and police, found themselves worse off than at any time since the Civil War.

The socializing function of finance capital facilitates enormously the task of overcoming capitalism. Once finance capital has brought the most importance branches of production under its control, it is enough for society, through its conscious executive organ - the state conquered by the working class - to seize finance capital in order to gain immediate control of these branches of production. Since all other branches of production depend upon these, control of large-scale industry already provides the most effective form of social control even without any further socialization. A society which has control over coal mining, the iron and steel industry, the machine tool, electricity, and chemical industries, and runs the transport system, is able, by virtue of its control of these most important spheres of production, to determine the distribution of raw materials to other industries and the transport of their products. Even today, taking possession of six large Berlin banks would mean taking possession of the most important spheres of large-scale industry, and would greatly facilitate the initial phases of socialist policy during the transition period, when capitalist accounting might still prove useful. There is no need at all to extend the process of expropriation to the great bulk of peasant farms and small businesses, because as a result of the seizure of large-scale industry, upon which they have long been dependent, they would be indirectly socialized just as industry is directly socialized. It is therefore possible to allow the process of expropriation to mature slowly, precisely in those spheres of decentralized production where it would be a long drawn out and politically dangerous process. In other words, since finance capital has already achieved expropriation to the extent required by socialism, it is possible to dispense with a sudden act of expropriation by the state, and to substitute a gradual process of socialization through the economic benefits which society will confer. [pp. 367-368]

The common people of that land of hope and glory adored their war leader, but they didn’t want him as a peace leader—a distinction that was clear to them but must have been confusing to Winnie. The Labour party obtained a majority of almost two to one; they got it upon the basis of a definite program calling for the nationalization of the five most important of the nation’s industries: coal, steel, transportation, communications, and finance.

THERE WAS A CERTAIN PARADOX in this sudden release and movement of human energy—from continents away, no less—all to dig in the dirt for a shiny metal that, once dug out successfully, was melted into neat rectangular bars and made its way back into darkness, in bank vaults, never again to see the light of day. Yet this arbitrary construct underpinned the entire monetary system of the United States and the world. The same primal attraction that had once led pirates, conquistadores, and medieval sovereigns to search for gold was now being mirrored in an age when wires transmitted words at near the speed of light. The value of gold then, as now, was largely based on a seemingly universal agreement, an article of faith: that gold is valuable because others see it as valuable. Why should the discovery or nondiscovery of a yellow metal in the dirt in California have any impact on the utilization of industrial capacity, growth of crops, transportation of goods via rail, improvement of the telegraph infrastructure, or any other economic activity? But its religious effect, regardless of its logic, was undeniable. The flood of gold helped unleash significant economic activity throughout the world.

The cybernetic union of humans and A.I. will lead to the automation and autonomazation of nearly everything. The first area where the gains will come will be agricultural robots because of the need to modernize the food supply chain. After that, we will likely see A.I. heavily influence transportation, communication, manufacturing, and companionship industries.

Insufficient fuel transportation would be one of the three greatest causes of the defeat of the Japanese (the others being the inadequate wartime replacement of pilots, and the starvation of industry by the destruction of Japan’s maritime transport).

It was no use. She said it as many times, with as many details, statistics, figures, proofs, as she could force out of her weary mind into their evasive hearing. It was no use. They neither refuted nor agreed; they merely looked as if her arguments were beside the point. There was a sound of hidden emphasis in their answers, as if they were giving her an explanation, but in a code to which she had no key. “There’s trouble in California,” said Wesley Mouch sullenly. “Their state legislature’s been acting pretty huffy. There’s talk of seceding from the Union.” “Oregon is overrun by gangs of deserters,” said Clem Weatherby cautiously. “They murdered two tax collectors within the last three months.” “The importance of industry to a civilization has been grossly overemphasized,” said Dr. Ferris dreamily. “What is now known as the People’s State of India has existed for centuries without any industrial development whatever.” “People could do with fewer material gadgets and a sterner discipline of privations,” said Eugene Lawson eagerly. “It would be good for them.” “Oh hell, are you going to let that dame talk you into letting the richest country on earth slip through your fingers?” said Cuffy Meigs, leaping to his feet. “It’s a fine time to give up a whole continent—and in exchange for what? For a dinky little state that’s milked dry, anyway! I say ditch Minnesota, but hold onto your transcontinental dragnet. With trouble and the riots everywhere, you won’t be able to keep people in line unless you have transportation—troop transportation—unless you hold your soldiers within a few days’ journey of any point on the continent. This is no time to retrench. Don’t get yellow, listening to all that talk. You’ve got the country in your pocket. Just keep it there.

The evidence of past mistakes was still everywhere in 2000. Koch Industries was still carrying the accumulated litter that was left behind by countless Value Creation Strategies, years of acquisitions, and rapid growth. As Koch reviewed its holdings, one executive described the corporate structure as representing a table piled high at a rummage sale, full of odds and ends that had no apparent rationale for belonging together. Koch began to unload these properties, selling off pipeline holdings like the Chase Transportation Company. It sold a chemical firm called Koch Microelectronic Service Company and closed down a new $30 million chemical plant in Bryan, Texas. Over a period of years, Koch would sell off thousands of miles of pipelines. The corporate odds and ends were discarded. The remaining businesses at Koch were restructured and streamlined. The most important division, Koch Petroleum, was renamed Flint Hills Resources and given new leaders. Other businesses were consolidated under a new, simplified structure that put them under the umbrella of a few new companies like Koch Minerals, Koch Supply & Trading, and Koch Chemical Technology Group.

The machinery and supply chains that Dubose oversaw were exceedingly complicated. But the economic rules that he lived by remained relatively simple. The rules had not changed for him since he had been an oil gauger roving the backwaters of the bayou on a skiff back in the early 1970s. Dubose knew that his career still hinged on whether he was over or short. When he was an oil gauger, Dubose made sure he was over when he drained small oil tanks. Now he had to make sure he was over on a shipping network that covered many states. The reasons for this had to do with the nature of the pipeline business. Koch made its money in the transportation business by moving oil, not just by selling it. The actual value of the oil in its pipeline was of secondary importance to Koch Industries. What really mattered was ensuring that the oil was moving. When the oil was moving, Koch was paid to collect it and to deliver it. This means that Koch was somewhat protected from the volatility in prices that continued to roil markets during the 1980s.

Farmland’s plants had a key advantage: they were located right next door to their customers—the farmers. This gave them an edge on transportation costs. If these plants closed, there would be a dramatic fertilizer shortage. It would be simply impossible to import all the fertilizer that midwestern farmers needed. The Farmland plants were similar to Koch’s oil refinery in Pine Bend. They were perched on exclusive real estate, giving them an advantage over their competitors. Demand wasn’t going to disappear, and it wasn’t feasible for new competitors to set up shop nearby. Perhaps most important, nobody else in the marketplace attributed this value to the Farmland plants. When Farmland put the plants up for sale, the co-op got very little interest. There were two big, publicly traded fertilizer companies that seemed like natural buyers, called Agrium and CF Industries. But these companies were also embroiled in the natural gas crisis and seemed obsessed with their quarterly losses and the near-term economics of the fertilizer business.

In 2001 the entire cattle and sheep industry of Great Britain was thrown into chaos by the discovery of foot-and-mouth disease in Northumberland. Within nine months, 3.8 million animals had been slaughtered to prevent the spread of the disease; and massive damage to agriculture was compounded by an estimated £10 billion of income lost by the tourist industry due to restrictions on travel in rural areas, and the concomitant discouragement of visitors to Great Britain in general. For a time, the army was required to manage the slaughter of herds suspected of infection, along with the disruption to transport, communications, villages and towns all across the country. All this was demanded, not by the threat of a potentially lethal disease, but by international regulations governing agricultural transport and exchange – for as Franklin points out, foot-and-mouth ‘is harmless to humans and rarely infects them’, while even to sheep it is rarely fatal, and usually ‘no more severe than the common cold’. It mainly causes problems in dairy herds, where (although once again seldom lethal) it reduces milk yield; hence its economic impact, which is massively compounded by the inability of affected countries to trade with countries where the virus is absent or at least quiescent. Sheep are therefore slaughtered during a foot-and-mouth outbreak only because they can transmit unprofitability to other agricultural sectors. Foot-and-mouth disease is ‘only lethal to domestic animals because it is economically intolerable to humans’.

Yet even as the federal government did little to check the breadth of the new slavery, the economic logic of the system weakened. Crude industrial enterprises to which slave labor lent itself so effectively for fifty years were being eclipsed by modern technologies and business strategies. Mechanized coal mining—using hydraulic digging tools, electric lights, modern pumps, and transportation—made obsolete the old manual labor mines of Alabama, packed with thousands of slave workers and mules.

Employment drug testing is a critical practice that helps businesses maintain a safe and productive environment. It ensures that employees are not using substances that could impair their judgment, performance, or safety at work. In industries where precision and safety are key, such as construction, healthcare, and transportation, regular drug testing reduces the risk of accidents and enhances overall workplace efficiency. Employers can implement employment drug testing during the hiring process or conduct random tests for current employees. This not only helps in detecting potential substance abuse but also serves as a preventive measure, deterring employees from using drugs. Additionally, it helps companies comply with legal regulations, avoiding costly lawsuits or fines related to workplace safety violations.

BARTON CENTRE, 912, 9th Floor, Mahatma Gandhi Rd, Bengaluru, Karnataka - 560 001 Phone Number +91 8884400919 Situated off the southeast shore of Africa, Mauritius is a shocking island country in the Indian Sea known for its perfectly clear waters, white sandy sea shores, and lavish green scenes. The volcanic island flaunts pleasant coral reefs and a different scope of verdure. Culture and Language Mauritius is a mixture of societies, with impacts from Indian, African, Chinese, and European practices. Local people communicate in a blend of dialects, with English, French, Creole, and Hindi being ordinarily utilized. This social variety is reflected in the island's food, music, and celebrations. 2. Outline of Mauritius Visit Bundles Sorts of Visit Bundles Accessible Mauritius Tour Package From Bangalore offer various choices, from extravagant ocean side hotels to daring eco-the travel industry encounters. Whether you're searching for a heartfelt escape, a family get-away, or a performance experience, there's a bundle to suit each voyager's inclinations. Irregularity and Best Times to Visit The best opportunity to visit Mauritius is from May to December when the weather conditions is cooler and drier, ideal for investigating the island's attractions and appreciating outside exercises. Top vacationer season is from October to April, so reserving your visit bundle ahead of time is suggested. 3. Features of a Mauritius Tour Package From Bangalore Flight Subtleties and Travel Length Departures from Bangalore to Mauritius normally take around 7 to 8 hours, with non-stop flights accessible for a helpful travel insight. Some visit bundles might incorporate flight appointments and air terminal exchanges for a problem free excursion. Considerations and Prohibitions in the Bundle Normal considerations in Mauritius visit bundles are convenience, dinners, touring visits, and exercises, for example, water sports and spa medicines. Rejections might shift yet frequently incorporate travel protection, visa charges, and individual costs. 4. Convenience and Transportation Choices Well known Lodging Decisions in Mauritius Mauritius offers a scope of facilities, from extravagance resorts disregarding the sea to shop lodgings settled in tropical nurseries. Famous decisions remember ocean front pieces of land for Terrific Baie, extravagance withdraws in Beauty Female horse, and eco-accommodating hotels in Dark Waterway Canyons Public Park. Transportation inside Mauritius Transportation choices in Mauritius incorporate taxicabs, rental vehicles, and public transports for getting around the island. Many visit bundles give air terminal exchanges and may likewise incorporate confidential transportation for touring visits and journeys. 5. Energizing Exercises and Attractions in Mauritius Ocean side Exercises and Water Sports Mauritius is a heaven for ocean side darlings and daredevils the same. From lazing on the immaculate sandy sea shores to enjoying an assortment of water sports, for example, swimming, scuba jumping, and parasailing, there is no deficiency of energy here. Whether you're a carefully prepared surfer or a fledgling hoping to get a few waves, Mauritius offers something for everybody. Investigating Nature and Untamed life Nature fans will be in wonderment of Mauritius' different scenes, from lavish woods and cascades to shocking greenhouses. Investigate the Dark Stream Crevasses Public Park to detect extraordinary widely varied vegetation, or visit the Seven Shaded Earths in Chamarel for a characteristic miracle. Try not to botch the opportunity to experience monster turtles at the Île aux Aigrettes nature hold for a really remarkable encounter. 6. Test Schedule for a Mauritius Visit from Bangalore

hands and transported by animal effort, eight dollars, ten dollars, sixteen dollars a ton. They were piled beside the railroad tracks as each section was built farther west. Hills of bones, mountains of blind skulls, loaded onto railroad cars and shipped back east to process sugar. So it was, every teaspoon of sugar that was stirred into a cup or baked into a pudding was haunted by the slave trade and the slaughter of the buffalo. Just as now, into every teaspoon, is mixed the pragmatic nihilism of industrial sugar farming and the death of our place on earth. This is the sweetness that pricks people’s senses and sparkles in a birthday cake and glitters on the tongue. Price guaranteed, delicious, a craving strong as love.

Because all the new enterprises needed workers, throughout most of the 1930s the cities' population rose quickly, nourished by a steady influx of country dwellers. But the daily needs of the urban dwellers were given a low priority, and living (and labor) conditions were spartan before the middle of the decade: Ration cards provided basic foodstuffs, with anything beyond staples such as bread or milk being exorbitantly expensive; housing was abysmal with people living in communal apartments, in which several families shared one kitchen and bathroom, and used one room each, while others slept on bunk beds in factory barracks without adequate heating, electricity, or running water; and public transport and schools functioned haltingly. Meanwhile, the amount of industrial accidents (and the number of people contracting work-related diseases) was staggering.

International Air Transport Association (IATA) requires that all individuals responsible for shipping biological lab samples must be IATA certified, similar to GCP certification. Monitors do not typically ask for the IATA certifications of people at the site; however, it is mandatory that people in charge of shipping be certified. Non-compliance with IATA

The labor arbitrage view of global trade, a model that goes back to the dawn of the First Industrial Revolution, assumes that manufacturing will always flow to low-cost countries. But the new automation view suggests that the advantages of cheap labor are shrinking while other factors—closeness to the ultimate consumer, transportation costs (including possible carbon taxes), flexibility, quality, and reliability—are rising.

In short, from its earliest point of development on, under the myth of divine kingship, the demoralizing accompaniments of unlimited power were revealed in both legend and recorded history. But these defects were for long overlaid by the exorbitant hopes the 'invisible machine' awakened. Though a multitude of single inventions for long lay beyond the scope of the collective machine, which could provide only partial and clumsy substitutes, the fundamental animus behind these inventions-the effort to conquer space and time, to speed transportation and communication, to expand human energy through the use of cosmic forces, to vastly increase industrial productivity, to over-stimulate consumption, and to establish a system of absolute centralized control over both nature and man-all had been planted and richly nurtured in the soil of fantasy during the first end of the megamachine. Some of the seeds shot up at once in riotous growth: others required five thousand years before they were ready to sprout. When that happened, the divine king would appear again in a new form. And the same infantile ambitions would accompany him, inflated beyond any previous dimension different only because they were at last realizable.

The history of the development of any urban center will be incomplete without a mention of the role of mass transit in the whole process. In deed the role of mass transit as a catalyst of industrial revolution and urbanization cannot be over emphasized. In the case of the New

The beef cattle industry provides a good example of how a fragmented industry can change in structure. The industry has historically been characterized by a large number of small ranchers grazing cattle on rangelands and transporting them to a meat-packer for processing. Raising cattle has traditionally involved few economies of scale; if anything, there could well be diseconomies of controlling a very large herd and moving it from area to area. However, technological developments have led to the wider use of the feedlot as an alternative process for fattening cattle. Under carefully controlled conditions, the feedlot has proven to be a far cheaper way to put weight on animals. Constructing feedlots requires large capital outlays, though, and there appear to be significant economies of scale in their operation. As a result, some large beef growers, such as Iowa Beef and Monfort, are emerging and the industry is concentrating. These large growers are beginning to be large enough to backward integrate into processing of feeds and to forward integrate into meat processing and distribution. The latter has led to the development of brand names. In this industry the fundamental cause of fragmentation was the production technology utilized for fattening cattle. Once this impediment to consolidation was removed, a process of structural change was triggered which has encompassed many elements of industry structure going far beyond feedlots alone.

industries – has become most apparent over the last decade and a half. During this period, software has “eaten” media, telecom, professional services, and retail and is increasingly “eating” banking, healthcare, education, energy, transportation

It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that mechanical invention until the thirteenth century A.D. owed a greater debt to warfare than to the arts of peace. This holds over long stretches of history. The Bronze Age chariot preceded the general use of wagons for transportation, burning oil was used to repel enemies besieging a city before it was employed for powering engines or heating buildings: so, too, inflated life preservers were used by Assyrian armies to cross rivers thousands of years before 'water-wings' were invented for civilian swimming. Metallurgical applications, too, developed more rapidly in the military than in the civilian arts: the scythe was attached to chariots for mowing down men before it was attached to agricultural mowing machines; while Archimedes' knowledge of mechanics and optics was applied to destroying the Roman fleet attacking Syracuse before it was put to any more constructive industrial use. From Greek fire to atom bombs, from ballistas to rockets, warfare was the chief source of those mechanical inventions that demanded a metallurgical and chemical background.

Modern biomimicry is far more than just copying nature's shapes. It includes systematic design and problem-solving processes, which are now being refined by scientists and engineers in universities and institutes worldwide. The first step in any of these processes is to clearly define the challenge we're trying to solve. Then we can determine whether the problem is related to form, function, or ecosystem. Next, we ask what plant, animal, or natural process solves a similar problem most effectively. For example, engineers trying to design a camera lens with the widest viewing angle possible found inspiration in the eyes of bees, which can see an incredible five-sixths of the way, or three hundred degrees, around their heads. The process can also work in reverse, where the exceptional strategies of a plant, animal, or ecosystem are recognized and reverse engineered. De Mestral's study of the tenacious grip of burrs on his socks is an early example of reverse engineering a natural winner, while researchers' fascination at the way geckos can hang upside down from the ceiling or climb vertical windows has now resulted in innovative adhesives and bandages. Designs based on biomimicry offer a range of economic benefits. Because nature has carried out trillions of parallel, competitive experiments for millions of years, its successful designs are dramatically more energy efficient than the inventions we've created in the past couple of hundred years. Nature builds only with locally derived materials, so it uses little transport energy. Its designs can be less expensive to manufacture than traditional approaches, because nature doesn't waste materials. For example, the exciting new engineering frontier of nanotechnology mirrors nature's manufacturing principles by building devices one molecule at a time. This means no offcuts or excess. Nature can't afford to poison itself either, so it creates and combines chemicals in a way that is nontoxic to its ecosystems. Green chemistry is a branch of biomimicry that uses this do-no-harm principle, to develop everything from medicines to cleaning products to industrial molecules that are safe by design. Learning from the way nature handles materials also allows one of our companies, PaxFan, to build fans that are smaller and lighter while giving higher performance. Finally, nature has methods to recycle absolutely everything it creates. In natures' closed loop of survival on this planet, everything is a resource and everything is recycled-one of the most fundamental components of sustainability. For all these reasons, as I hear one prominent venture capitalist declare, biomimicry will be the business of the twenty-first century. The global force of this emerging and fascinating field is undeniable and building on all societal levels.

As we'll see throughout this book, nature's problem-solving strategies offer immense opportunities for wealth creation in a new economy. Whether the shatter-resistant ceramics of an abalone shell, the superior drag resistance demonstrated by seaweeds, or the pure combustion of plant photosynthesis, impacted industries range from construction to transportation to medicine to software. Nature's paradigm does what human technology tries to do-and does it sustainably without stripping out the base resources that create wealth. So what's preventing us from more rapid adoption of bio-inspired design?

is clear that neither countries nor regions can flourish if their cities (innovation ecosystems) are not being continually nourished. Cities have been the engines of economic growth, prosperity and social progress throughout history, and will be essential to the future competitiveness of nations and regions. Today, more than half of the world’s population lives in urban areas, ranging from mid-size cities to megacities, and the number of city dwellers worldwide keeps rising. Many factors that affect the competitiveness of countries and regions – from innovation and education to infrastructure and public administration – are under the purview of cities. The speed and breadth by which cities absorb and deploy technology, supported by agile policy frameworks, will determine their ability to compete in attracting talent. Possessing a superfast broadband, putting into place digital technologies in transportation, energy consumption, waste recycling and so on help make a city more efficient and liveable, and therefore more attractive than others. It is therefore critical that cities and countries around the world focus on ensuring access to and use of the information and communication technologies on which much of the fourth industrial revolution depends. Unfortunately, as the World Economic Forum’s Global Information Technology Report 2015 points out, ICT infrastructures are neither as prevalent nor diffusing as fast as many people believe. “Half of the world’s population does not have mobile phones and 450 million people still live out of reach of a mobile signal. Some 90% of the population of low-income countries and over 60% globally are not online yet. Finally, most mobile phones are of an older generation.”45

I’d be hard-pressed to find a better start to a brand story than the one that chronicles the birth of “the people’s car,” the Tata Nano. The story goes that Ratan Tata, chairman of the well-respected Tata Group, was travelling along in the pouring rain behind a family who was precariously perched on a scooter weaving in and out of traffic on the slick wet roads of Bangalore. Tata thought that surely this was a problem he and his company could solve. He wanted to bring safe, affordable transport to the poor—to design, build, and sell a family car that could replace the scooter for a price that was less than $2,500. It was a business idea born from a high ideal and coming from a man with a track record in the industry, someone with the capability to innovate, design, and produce a high-quality product. People were captivated by the idea of what would be the world’s cheapest car. The media and the world watched to see how delivering on this seemingly impossible promise might pan out. Ratan Tata did deliver on his promise when he unveiled the Nano at the New Delhi Auto Expo in 2009, six years after having the idea. The hype around the new “people’s car” and the media attention it received meant that any mistakes were very public (several production challenges and safety problems were reported along the way). And while the general public seemed to be behind the idea of a new and fun Indian-led innovation, the number of Facebook likes (almost 4 million to date) didn’t convert to actual sales. It seemed that while Tata Motors was telling a story about affordability and innovating with frugal engineering (perhaps “lean engineering” might have worked better for them), the story prospective customers were hearing was one about a car that was cheap. The positioning of the car was at odds with the buying public’s perception of it. In a country where a car is an aspirational purchase, the Nano became symbolic of the car to buy if you couldn’t afford anything else. Since its launch in 2009, just over 200,000 Nanos have sold. The factory has the capacity to produce 21,000 cars a month. It turns out that the modest numbers of people buying the Nano are not the scooter drivers but middle-class Indians who are looking for a second car, or a car for their parents or children. The car that was billed as a “game changer” hasn’t lived up to the hype in the hearts of the people who were expected to line up and buy it in the tens of thousands. Despite winning design and innovation awards, the Nano’s reputation amongst consumers—and the story they have come to believe—has been the thing that’s held it back.

the group existed, these six had been accumulating shares in key industries such as communications, transport, banking, pharmaceutical, medical, technology and other key industries worldwide. They were shrewd enough to hide what they were doing – very seldom would they buy controlling shares, and never in their personal names. Instead, the acquisitions were always through companies that owned companies that owned yet more companies - hiding themselves five, six or more levels away from the front, the public eye and any security screens.